Willa Cather write what she knows - you don’t see them quite enough from the outside

Willa Cather had published a book of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), a major theme of which is the hostility of her native Midwest to artists.  She was having trouble moving forward as a writer.  My understanding is that her friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett helped her change.  “I want you to be surer of your backgrounds,” Jewett wrote in a 1908letter, meaning her Nebraska childhood, and for that matter her life in New York writing for a magazine.  Jewett is giving the “write what you know” advice, but with more depth.  “These are uncommon equipment, but you don’t see them quite enough from the outside…”

Cather found a couple of ways to embrace her subject yet be outside of her material.  In a 1921 interview feature, Cather says: “[Jewett] said to me that if my life had lain in a part of the world that was without a literature, and I couldn't tell about it truthfully in the form I most admired, I'd have to make a kind of writing that would tell it, no matter what I lost in the process.”

That last phrase is interesting.  What did she lose, I wonder?  “A painter or writer must learn to distinguish what is his own from that which he admires.”  She gives up what she admires to find what is her own.

So, two ways to keep her distance.  One is to use frames heavily, a story-within-a-story structure like in The Professor’s House or distancing narrators as in A Lost Lady and My Ántonia.  Both are novels about idealized women, the wealthy wife of a retired railroad magnate in the former and a group of immigrant servants in the latter, but with the stories witnessed or told by the young men who have idealized them.  Lots of ways for the character not to be Cather, when he shares her memories. 

The “Introduction” to My Ántonia is an almost comical denial that the book is written by Cather. No, this is by her friend Jim Burden, who started out writing a few memories of one particular “Bohemian girl” and somehow wrote an entire memoir.  “My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.”  Cather never writes anything except the Introduction, yet it is her name on the cover!  These writers, what thieves.

Of course we all know that the existence of the frame changes the “aboutness” of the story, too, that it is also “about” the narrator or observer, maybe even largely about the narrator.

We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.  It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.  (Introduction)

There is that new form, that new kind of writing, I guess, one that can do two things at once, or three, or more.

I’ll try one more of those things tomorrow, although or because I do not understand it well.  Let’s look at classical Cather.

The Professor's House, Willa Cather's exploration adventure novel

I’m going to do this backwards, writing about The Professor’s House (1925), which is not a prairie novel, first and then go back to A Lost Lady and so on.

Do you remember the fun we all had, way back in 2012, with the MLA International Bibliography and its possible uses as a way to measure the academic reputation of books and authors?  If I put in “American Literature” right now, I see that Willa Cather ranks #17 with 2,384 papers, books, etcs. tagged with her name since the beginning of the database in 1946.  Faulkner, James and Melville blow everyone else away, but #17 is high.  There is also a list of the top individual works – I can only see the top 50 – and two of them are Cather’s, My Ántonia, obviously, and The Professor’s House.  Were you expecting The Professor’s House to be the second-most studied work of Cather’s?  I was not.

The novel is short, 170 pages in the Library of America volume, and is even shorter than it looks.  The first hundred pages are about Professor St. Peter and his family.  They live in a city that may have a shadowy coexistence with Milwaukee.  The professor has just completed a life’s work, a multi-volume history of the Spanish in the American Southwest, something along the lines of Francis Parkman’s seven volume France and England in North America (1865-92).  He is casting about for a purpose.  One task is to edit a journal left to him by his best student, Tom Outland, who was killed in the war and also by chance made the professor’s family enormously rich with a patent for a mysterious gas.  There is some soap opera stuff there that I did not enjoy much.

That’s right, Tom Outland.  His journal is about that time he discovered the Anasazi ruins now known as Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, one of America’s great treasures.  What, lots of important explorers have names like Tom Outland.

I thought the journal was terrific.  It was a completely convincing piece of writing of its type, worthy of company with Hiram Bingham’s Inca Land (1922), about Bingham’s accidental discovery of Machu Picchu, or say John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).  Of course this text is a fiction, a few actual events mixed with invention.  It is an alternate-world discovery of an alternate-world ruin.

I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow.  Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep.  It was as still as sculpture – and something like that.  It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of one another, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.  (II.iii)

That tower is the iconic symbol of Mesa Verde.  The glimpse of it through the snow by a cattleman looking for strays, Cather borrowed that from the true story.  But even here she aestheticizes the incident in her own way.

Just for the subject matter, the inset novella is intensely interesting.  Then, for seventeen pages, it is back to Professor St. Peter – these symbolic names! – and his problems.  Then The Professor’s House is over.  One major critical issue with the novel is how or frankly whether the pieces mesh in any but the crudest way.  But the novella, the discovery, that was thrilling.  And not in any way about the Great Plains.

it was still, all day long, Nebraska - Willa Cather is too close to home

For a long time I had a regional aversion to reading Willa Cather, and now that I have read five of her books I am not sure that I have shed it.  Does anybody else suffer from this malady?  As a readerly youth, I wanted to read about There, any There, not Here, and Red Cloud, Nebraska, was very much Here.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.  (My Ántonia, I.i)

The narrator is seeing Nebraska from the train.  Accurately said, narrator of My Ántonia.

I grew up about an hour and a half from Red Cloud, the setting, as fictional settings go, of O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), although I did not visit it until a couple of years ago.  Besides Cather’s childhood home, the sights in Red Cloud are pretty much all centered on My Ántonia, which partly takes place in town, while O Pioneers! is entirely out in the countryside, and sod houses do not survive too long.

Red Cloud is easily worth visiting if you happen to be in the area, which you will not be, because there is nothing in the area.  It is not “in the area” of anything.  Except where I grew up.

Our guide, who was great, told me that Cather scholars have their convention in Red Cloud every other year, and all I could think was “Oh no.  Do not become a Cather scholar.  Your conference is Here.”  I mean, where do they eat?  In Lincoln, Nebraska, which has a big state university and a state capitol, there is a wine bar which is below an Indian restaurant, so you can have wine with a platter of Indian snacks, just as an example.  I have done this my own self.  Lincoln is part of what I call civilization.  Red Cloud is a couple of hours from civilization.  Farther, when Cather lived there.

Cather’s first book, The Troll Garden, is a collection of short stories largely on this exact theme.  The title character of “The Sculptor’s Funeral” only returns to his little town in Kansas when he dies.  No one there has any idea what to do with him.  The category of “artist” does not exist.  To be an artist, you go away, to There.  “A Wagner Matinee” is even more pathetic, or cruel.  An aunt visits Boston, from Nebraska, and goes to a concert.  The story ends, almost:

I spoke to my aunt.  She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. “I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!”

The last paragraph describes where she has to go – Nebraska.

“Paul’s Case” is set in Pittsburgh and is on the same theme, a reminder that the city itself is no kind of guarantee.  For a long time, “Paul’s Case” was the only Cather I had read, but it was some Cather, and therefore I had read Cather.

But now, My Ántonia and A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House (1925), so I will write a note or two on those.

Edith Wharton's semiotics - they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs…  (Ch. 6)

This line is not from an essay on semiotics, but from The Age of Innocence (1920), so in a sense, yes, from an essay on semiotics, but ahead of its time is what I am saying.

Newland Archer is the smartest and most sophisticated member of the tiny social elite of New York circa 187-, but that does not stop him from getting into a little bit of trouble with an interesting and exotic woman.  It almost stops him, and the behind-the-scenes scheming of that society, his family and fiancée and a number of others, including the interesting woman, does stop him.

This is a classic 20th century story, used in many novels.  The smart guy is not as smart as he thinks he is, and the dumb people around him are not as dumb as he thinks they are.  The point of view stays very close to Newland, allowing me to share and enjoy his surprise and defeats.

This is all a representation of Wharton’s world, but she would have been in her teens at the time.

Newland’s sophistication is shown, again and again, by his interest in poetry.  There is quite a lot of signification of taste in The Age of Innocence.  Just a few lines after the “hieroglyphic” quotation, Wharton shows us Newland training his fiancée in the proper understanding of Tennyson:

(She was advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.)

This is how Wharton undermines sympathy in Newland, with whom I, the reader, am stuck.  His taste is perfect, correct, but geez.  “His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books” (Ch. 9).  Or how about this, an unboxing video, without the video: “That evening he unpacked his books from London,” finding Herbert Spencer, Alphonse Daudet, “and a novel called ‘Middlemarch,’ as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews” (Ch. 15).

One of the novellas, thankfully only one (“False Dawn”), in Old New York (1924) is entirely about the arbitrary signifiers of taste.  A young American does his Grand Tour with a big budget for paintings, but he has the misfortune of encountering, in Switzerland, the young John Ruskin, who corrupts his tastes and leads him to blow his money on obscure antique painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico rather than Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa, which poisons his relationship with his father – poisons his father – “it was the affair of the pictures that had killed him” (Ch. 7) – and eventually his life.

The giant, crashing irony is that although it would not be so bad to own (and sell) a Rosa, Ruskin and his pre-Raphaelite pals had led the young sap to the “right” paintings, worth a fortune in 1924 (and still today).  This irony is rubbed in on the last page, but you, educated and sophisticated in art history, will have gotten it long before that.

I do not know if “False Dawn” Is good, exactly, but it was fascinating to see Wharton deal with Ruskin and the arbitrary signifiers so directly.  It was clearly on her mind for some reason.

The Age of Innocence and so on - the French war hero has her jokes

I have been reading quite a lot of Edith Wharton lately, but I took the wrong notes, so what can I say?  Let’s see.

Wharton was in France when the war started in 1914.  Let’s look in the Library of America Chronology to see what she did: “establishes and directs American Hostels for Refugees,” “organizes Children of Flanders Rescue Committee,” “helps establish treatment program for tubercular French soldiers,” etc.  “Made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor” – Edith Wharton, who was 52 when the war began, was a genuine French war hero.  A wealthy woman, she spent quite a lot of her own money on her humanitarian efforts, aside from foregoing income she could have earned writing fiction.  If anyone deserved a best-seller, it was Wharton.  The Age of Innocence (1920) made her a million bucks, in today’s money, over the next few years.

Plus, it’s her best book, which does not hurt.  Best as, you know, literary art.  Best I’ve read of The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and almost but not quite all of her short fiction and novellas published through Old New York (1924).  I do not know why I became so invested in Wharton’s short stories, except that I was out of the country, the collections are in the public domain and available on the internet, and she is consistently good.  Probably a book like Anita Brookner’s Collected Stories of Edith Wharton makes more sense than reading everything.  Everything, almost, has not been bad, though.

For a long time, decades, the only Wharton I had read was the schoolboy punishment Ethan Frome (1911) which has turned out to be, whatever its frigid virtues, deeply unrepresentative of Wharton.  I should have read one of the famous novels as well.  All three are pretty great.

Because of the war, or her age, or who knows what, in the 1920s Wharton went back in time, with Age of Innocence beginning in the 1870s, I think, and the Old New York stories in the 1840s.  This leads to my one complaint about Age.  She cannot resist prophetic jokes.  Our hero and heroine are having an illicit rendezvous.  They choose a new institution, because no one goes there:

Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities” mouldered in uninvited loneliness…

“It’s odd,” Madame Olenska said, “I never came here before.”

“Ah, well–.  Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum.”

“Yes,” she assented absently.  (Ch. 31)

Or from a bit earlier:

... he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.” (Ch. 29)

Maybe I am wrong and this is not a lapse of taste and Wharton should have piled on more of these jokes.  Those are marvels.  It is a great museum.  Have your fun.

Interesting Dreiser - its ouphe and barghest cry - the weirdness of it

Two pro-Dreiser notes.

First: roughly the first third of An American Tragedy is our hero Clyde as a rootless teen from an odd background, rooting around. In the second third, he becomes more settled, meets a nice girl, and begins to think hard about how to murder her.  The last third is briefly a detective novel, then a courtroom novel, then a prison novel – Death Row.  Dreiser, in a surprising bow to good taste, does not show us Clyde in the electric chair, but he gets as close as he dares.

Dreiser is working through a complex performance of novelistic sympathy, a fundamental task of the novel as a form.  Can I sympathize with Clyde’s various early troubles – presumably not with the idea of murder – and also with at least certain aspects of his time in prison?  Do I forget his victim?  Can I sympathize with this but not with that?  What if, more strongly, I spent the first part of the novel identifying with Clyde, whatever that means?  How shocked am I when his sociopathy emerges?  I hope I am shocked.

That first third has, by my standard, the most bad sentences per page, and is in some sense mostly background, and I wish Dreiser had cut a lot of it.  The last third, the trial and prison and so on, are presented in a strong plain style but are extremely detailed.  The entire prosecution is presented, for example.  A faithful film adaptation just of Clyde’s trial would take many hours.  A friendly commenter yesterday wanted much of this stuff to be cut – “he could not stop belaboring the point.”

But we are both wrong in that Dreiser can’t start with the crime if he wants to work on the possibility of sympathy.  I have to live with Clyde for a while to even to lose sympathy.  And then I have to grind through the tedium of his encounter with the courts and prison to build it back.  It is the difference between watching a two-hour film of the story, in one sitting, or a 22-episode season of television spread over nine months.

On the other hand, we are both right.  If we can’t stand the prose or the tedium, we are not reading with the intensity of the reader who is really gripped by poor dumb Clyde.

Here’s where I started reading with more intensity – I’m moving to my second point.  Look at this beauty (Clyde is in the woods in upstate New York, with murder on his mind):

And at one point it was that a weir weir, one of the solitary water-birds of this region, uttered its ouphe and barghest cry, flying from somewhere near into some darker recess within the woods.  (II.44)

Every word in that sentence is a legitimate English word, but this time the weird ones are not fussy Latinates but good Germanic antiques, known mostly to readers who owned the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual II (1983).  Now we’re right in the murder chapter:

[The lake] was black or dark like tar, and sentineled to the east and north by tall, dark pines – the serried spears of armed and watchful giants, as they now seemed to him – ogres almost – so gloomy, suspicious and fantastically erratic was his own mood in regard to all this.  But still there were too many people – as many as ten on the lake.

The weirdness of it.

The difficulty.  (II.47)

It’s those little floating sentences that I find especially weird.

Dreiser, looking for an expert on criminal psychology, has turned to Edgar Allan Poe and his Imp of the Perverse, which Dreiser turns into the clumsier “Efrit of his own darker self.”  I was tipped off by the word “tarn” for lake, since the most famous tarn in American literature is the one the House of Usher falls into.  It’s not just Poe’s psychology, but Poe’s language that is borrowed, as if the one is tangled in the other.

These elements –  the weir-weir bird and the Efrit and dark tarns and trees like spears – recur often and add some strange colors to the novel that are at least interesting if not good.  Maybe good is overrated.

Dreiser is a bad writer - or maybe he is good - those odd and mentally disturbed or distrait souls who are to be found in every place

I have a question.  When does bad writing become merely odd and then maybe interesting and perhaps even good?  Let’s stop at interesting.  Theodore Dreiser is a good test.  The Library of America edition of An American Tragedy (1925) is 930 pages of prose that is never good as such, and is often quite bad.  But those categories in between, how much of it lands there?

Dreiser may be, among great novelists, the worst prose writer.  I was surprised to see how little he had changed in the twenty-five years since Sister Carrie (1900).  Decades later, he is the same giant klutzo.  His virtues are the same, too.  As bad as he can be, in key scenes, the ones on which the novel succeeds or fails, his prose kind of snaps into place, turning into an intense, focused plain style.  The streetcar strike, or Hurstwood staring at the safe, are good examples from Sister Carrie.  An American Tragedy is, or turns into, a crime novel, so just about anything relating to the murder, the detective investigation, the trial, or prison qualifies.  That’s about half of the novel – the 900-page novel.  Which leaves a lot of pages.

If it possible to be a bad writer but a great novelist, Dreiser is that thing.  Even I can see that.

Critics have traditionally amused themselves by collecting the worst examples of Dreiser’s sentences.  I swore I would not do that, and I did not, but I will borrow one from Francis Ludlow's 1946 article “The Plodding Crusader” (The English Journal, Oct. 1946, pp. 419-25):

And yet hang it all, most of them did not live at home as he did, or if they did like Ratterer, they had parents who didn’t mind what they did.  (I.8)

What an ear for prose, and this is a line without any misshapen Latinisms, words like “tergiversation” or “staccatically” or Dreiser’s great favorite “distrait” – he often describes women as “distrait” – that are real English words, available for novelists to use, I guess, but sparingly, please.  “She grew tense and staccato” (II.38).  It is not as if I do not get what Dreiser means.  Bad, odd, interesting?

Here we see Jonathan Yardley, in 2003 in The Washington Post, argue, upon the publication of the Library of America edition of An American Tragedy, that the novel is so bad that it casts doubt on the value of the Library of America project!  “[A]ll this suggests that editorial judgment and discrimination no longer matter at the Library of America” – for publishing what I think of as a pretty solidly canonical novel.

I’ll do another day on this monster, arguing with myself about whether the first 300 pages or so should have been cut, and looking at some sentences that maybe move from “interesting” to “good.”  I had not known that Dreiser owed such a debt to Poe.

That title "distrait" is from Book 3, Chapter 2.  I said it is Dreiser's women who are "distrait," but Clyde becomes "distrait and gloomy" in prison.

He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg - Sinclair Lewis produces

Sinclair Lewis has his first big hit with Main Street (1920) when he’s thirty-five years-old and his second with Babbitt (1922).  I’m poking around in his Library of America Chronology.  “November [1922], screen and dramatic rights to Babbitt sold to Warners for $50,000,” (p. 859), which, as always turning to the BLS inflation calculator, is a whopping $752,309.52 in today’s money, quite a pile.

Meanwhile, George Babbitt, who runs his father-in-law’s real estate office and is a big deal in Zenith City, don’t doubt that, is arguing with his daughter who is thinking of maybe going to work for a charity of all things:

“The sooner a man learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ‘em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce – produce – produce!” (II.ii)

The “flipflop and doodads” bit, authentic frontier gibberish, is a good example of why the novel is such fun and was so popular, Lewis having figured out how to turn H. L. Mencken’s caustic Smart Set mockery of the American bourgeois into a real novel.  But it is those last words – if you for some reason descend to the very bottom of Wuthering Expectations, you will find the “inspirational” quotation from Sartor Resartus that George is parroting.  Well, it has inspired me.

Babbitt is a midlife crisis novel.  George has everything figured out, everything is going his way, except for the passage of time, and he has a crisis of meaning that allows Lewis to work him over pretty thoroughly.  I figured the novel would fizzle, but no, it has a real ending.

The book is structured much like the prestige series television of our time.  The first quarter is a “day in the life” of George Babbitt, which would fill the two-hour pilot.  Subsequent chapters are episodic – the Babbitts have a dinner party, George goes to a real estate convention – but little bits of plot accumulate until the story of George’s crisis emerges moving us to the season or perhaps series finale.

My favorite bit of George’s ordinary day.  He is enjoying his bath.  Really enjoying it:

The light fell on the inner surface of the tub in a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear water trembled…  He patted the water, and the reflected light capsized and leaped and volleyed.  He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.  (VII.iii)

George has an aesthetic sense, which is why he is worth putting in a novel, why he is worth saving, in whatever sense he is saved.  I am not sure why Lewis, on the next page, lectures George for liking “standard advertised wares” and so on.  Sometimes Lewis seems to lack confidence in his readers.

After his bath, George goes to bed and dreams of the fairy child – that aesthetic sense again – “beyond perilous moors the brave sea glittered” (VII.vi) – not what I was expecting in Babbitt, nor was I expecting what comes immediately before George’s dream.  He is asleep, and Lewis wanders through the city in a series of fragments, visiting a late-night meeting of union officials, hopping to a factory producing tractors “for the Polish army,” and then to Mike Monday, “the distinguished evangelist” who “had once been a prize-fighter.”  For about five pages, Babbitt turns into a John Dos Passos novel, just in this one place.  I don’t think this is what caught the attention of Warner Brothers, but it is pretty interesting.

reading some famous U.S. novels of the 1920s - in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man

Not writing is a lot easier than writing, but I have some things I at least imagine I want to write, so I guess I will see if I remember how to write.  American books, Mimesis, British books, French books.  I am tired of being ignorant in private, so I will return, for a while, to being ignorant in public.

I feel that I do not know American literature especially well, but of course I know it better than any other; the feeling of not knowing it is an illusion caused by being surrounded by the stuff my whole life.  I also feel that I have recently immersed myself in American literature of, mostly, the first half of the 1920s, although when I add it up it is not really that many books.  Another illusion, caused by reading not just a pile of novels but also Langston Hughes’s great memoir of the ‘20s, The Big Sea (1940) and Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light (1952), like I am really digging in.

But many of the books – well, the fiction, not the poetry, whole ‘nother world there – are famous ones, sizable Humiliations that I have avoided for decades, so famous that they seemed all too familiar even if I did not really know exactly what was in them.  The Age of Innocence (1920), An American Tragedy (1925), Babbitt (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald, some Willa Cather novels – they seemed maybe a little dull.  They're not really so dull.

I am not used to reading such popular books.  They were big best-sellers, top 10 of the year, or close.  Cather was not in that game, although she sold pretty well, and Dreiser’s novel does not make the Top 10, but it made him instantly wealthy, allowing him to spend the rest of his life trying to write a “book of philosophy entitled The Formula Called Man” (Library of America timeline, 1935) and advocating for Stalinism.  Terrific.

Learning about Fitzgerald’s finances explained half of his life to me.  In 1919, he is almost unpublished; in 1920 he is selling stories, several of them, to the Saturday Evening Post for $3,000 a pop*. How much would that be today?  $39,291.61 – holy cow!  Plus he is getting movie money, options and so on, although at this point Fitzgerald and Dreiser and Wharton make as much money from selling books, not the rights to books.

Lewis was a hack writer who with Main Street (1920), which I have not read, hit on a perfect satirical comic formula, perfect for his audience but more importantly perfect for his talent.  Every couple of years he could write one on a new topic: business, religion, science, politics.  Let me fill out the magnificent quotation from Babbitt I put in the title:

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” (Ch. XIV.iii)

The irony goes a couple of different directions there, doesn't it?  Another irony is that this, or something like it, wins Lewis a Nobel Prize.  Dreiser was a real possibility for a Nobel, too, for that big clunker of all things.  Plenty of prizes, plenty of prestige, are attached to these books, along with the cash.

I’ll wander through American literature for a few days and see what I remember.  Then it will be back to the booze and spaghetti.

* I made a grotesque error of memory here, which I corrected in a later post. Fitzgerald quickly hopped to $900 per story, and pretty soon "Benjamin Button" earned $1,000 - but not $3,000. Still, the basic point, about the huge amount of money suddenly dropped on Fitzgerald, is intact. Just not so much per story

Ezra Pound's Literary Essays, or "the science of being discontented"

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954) is a selection of Pound’s critical, scholarly, and ranting writings from say 1914 through 1934, heavily weighted to a glorious period from say 1916 through 1922 when Pound was reading everything, old and new, and writing about it with the greatest possible energy.  T. S. Eliot selected the essays, and while Pound’s criticism is no more insightful than Eliot’s – might be less, even – it is more fun to read.

So maybe sometimes Pound sounds like a crackpot.  Not that often, and Eliot protects him from his worst side.  By crackpot, I mean something like the sudden appearance, in a long, complex essay on Guido Cavalcanti, of Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is “[t]he only living author who has ever taken a city or held up the diplomatic crapule at the point of machine-guns, he is in a position to speak with more authority [about poetry!] than a batch of neurasthenic incompetents…” (192).

This is a late essay, from 1934, when Pound’s cracks are more visible.  Yet the very next page is full of insights about translating Cavalcanti, his own translations and D. G. Rossetti’s.  About poetic translation in general, really:

What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary – which I, let us hope, got rid of a few years later.  You can’t go round this sort of thing.  It takes six or eight years to get educated in one’s art, and another ten to get rid of that education.

… Rossetti made his own language.  I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.

It is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions of precurrent authors, even when they are fools or flapdoodles or Tennysons.  (193-4)

He is usually this casual, almost as if he is speaking.  He is naturally aphoristic.  “Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another” (“Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,” 241) is one I like.  He means, he explains a bit later, historically.  “For every ‘great age’ a few poets have written a few beautiful lines, or found a few exquisite melodies, and ten thousand people have copied them, until each strand of music is planed down to a dullness” (243-4).

Pound’s demand to “make it new” is really to “make it great,” but with the assumption that who are we kidding the retreads of the old stuff, however skilled, will not end up in that “great” category.  In an early essay, “The Renaissance,” Pound lists “his own spectrum or table” of the greats, beginning with “Homer, Sappho, Ibycus, Theocritus’ idyl of the woman spinning with charmed wheel” (215), then moving on through the Romans and so on.  Catullus, “[n]ot Virgil,” a handful of his beloved Provençal poems, Dante and “The Seafarer” and Villon.

But not too much, really.  “A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented,”  (“The Renaissance,” 216).  The poems that make us discontented with other poems, those are the great ones.  Different poems for each of us, of course.

Quite a collection.  Full of surprises, at the level of word, line, subject, and idea.

Northrop Frye's Fables of Identity - the conventions of literature contain the experience

The latest book in my reading of classics of literary criticism is Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (1963) by Northrop Frye, a collection of magazine writing and so on from the 1950s and early 1960s that serves as a sequel to another Frye classic, one that I have not read, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).  “That very theoretical book stated in its preface that a work of practical criticism was needed to complement it” (p. 1), and this is in effect that.  This, a different “this,” the quotation, explains why I wanted to read Fables of Identity more than Anatomy.

The essays take as their subjects Spenser (specifically The Faerie Queene), Shakespeare (the sonnets, The Winter’s Tale), Milton (“Lycidas”), Blake, Byron, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, and Joyce (Finnegans Wake).  They are full on useful insights.  I “tested” some of them, re-reading the Shakespeare play and the Milton poem, as well as quite a lot of Wallace Stevens.  It was a good experiment.  Well, I did not really follow the argument in the Stevens piece, which constructs a metaphysics from single lines pulled from thirty years of poems.  I think I followed the rest.  They are magazine pieces, or talks.  They are meant to be followed.

To jump back to my little project, compared to Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending Frye is a model of clarity and compared to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations his ideas have not been so thoroughly sponged up.  It also does not hurt that Frye occasionally uses humor:

Many readers tend to assume that Spenser wrote [The Faerie Queene] in the same way that they read it, starting at the beginning and keeping on until he collapsed with exhaustion.  (69)

Mild, but a relief from the weight of Spenser.

The “fables” and “mythology” in the title are meant broadly.  They can be taken to mean something like the elements that are common among works of literature rather than those that are individual to the text.  The epic form, the pastoral elegy, the hero quest, stories structured around seasonal change.  That sort of thing.  Some of it explicitly uses existing mythic stories, some of it – like Blake’s big poems – tries to turn old myths into new, and some is unconscious.  To the extent that texts fall completely outside of this framework, Frye ignores them.  Maybe everything fits.  I don’t know.

In “Nature and Homer,” Frye generously suggest that everything fits, that the study of Shakespeare and comic strips is just “exploring different literary conventions” (50), that “[w]herever he goes in his imaginative verbal experience, the conventions of literature contain the experience” (51).  Fables of Identity is for readers who enjoy literature itself, literature as such.

OK, come back in a couple of months for Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, or however much of it I have read at that point.

The Rise of David Levinsky - nothing short of a miracle - devoid of significance

Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) is an immigrant rags-to-riches novel.  Levinsky comes to America “with four cents in my pocket,” an orphan, and by the end is “worth more than two  million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States.”  His memoir, though, is about his “inner identity,” which has not changed.  On the one hand, he has gone through changes that are “nothing short of a miracle;” on the other they are “devoid of significance.”  All of these quotations are from the novel’s first paragraph.  I have never read a Horatio Alger novel, but I assume that Cahan differentiates himself from one in a few lines.

Cahan’s novel is dated in a couple of ways.  His character explains a lot about Judaism and his culture:

A Talmudic education was until recent years practically the only kind of  education a Jewish boy of old-fashioned parents received.  I spent seven  years at it, not counting the several years of Talmud which I had had at the  various cheders.

What is the Talmud?  (Book II, “Enter Satan,” Ch. 1)

And then he explains what the Talmud is.  Not that we do not still need novels, or whatever, that tell gentiles what the Talmud is, but I think there are many more books with this educational aspect than were available in 1917.

Second, there are a number of scenes, especially early in the novel when Levinsky arrives in America, describing Jewish New York, mostly the Lower East Side, that are a delight but are in some sense now historical.  There are now many descriptions of the time and place.  We have translations from Yiddish writers now, for example, the plays of Jacob Gordin or Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son or poets like Moishe Leib Halpern – or literary histories like Ruth Wisse’s Little Love in Big Manhattan, about those poets – making Cahan’s Jewish New York more familiar.

The art of the novel lies in its voice, which curiously means in its simulation of artlessness.  Cahan’s short stories from twenty years earlier, the AmericanizedChekhov of The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York (1898) were more artful in their language, detail, and imagery.  But why would David Levinsky, who runs a garment factory, write as well as Abraham Cahan?  Levinsky is intelligent and educated, however narrowly, but he does not write as if he has made his living by writing for forty years.

A late section set in the Catskills is an exception, with Levinsky finding a more poetic, metaphorical style, but that is because he is in love.  His tone when writing about his business is entirely different.  Much of the art of the novel is in how Cahan matches Levinsky’s rhetorical mode to his psychological state at any given time.

Levinsky is not exactly an unreliable narrator, in that he is never dishonest and never seems to deliberately hide anything, but there are plenty of times where he seems to have trouble hearing himself.  The novel is a clever exercise in readerly sympathy.  In his business practices,  especially, Levinsky is pretty ruthless, without much investigation of his own ethics.  In business, in sales, in relations with his employees, anything goes.  He can be self-pitying, a braggart, a bit of a schlemiel with women.  He is kind of annoying.  He is an artful character, but some of that artfulness is conceptual.

Readers like me will enjoy how his life is ruined, or saved, or anyways permanently changed when he is given a copy of Dombey and Son and has to rearrange his job, his life, everything, so that he has time to read it.

D. G. Myers’s review fills in some of my gaps.

sometimes life makes its own books - they do if you're Langston Hughes - his memoir The Big Sea

Another memoir, The Big Sea (1940) by Langston Hughes.  It covers his childhood, his time as a sailor and in Europe, and the Harlem Renaissance, to break it into rough thirds.  These are interesting subjects.  If Hughes had never written a poem, but somehow had still written some version of this book, a version with fewer poems, it would still be a good book.  Hughes lived an interesting life.

Hughes’s mode is conversational and humorous.  Not exactly plain; not fancy.  Here is Hughes in Paris, where he is finally doing alright, working as a busboy in a black nightclub:

That room was right out of a book, and I began to say to myself that I guess dreams do come true, and sometimes life makes its own books, because here I am living in a Paris garret, writing poems and having champagne for breakfast (because champagne is what we had with our breakfast at the Grand Duc from the half-empty bottles left by unsuspecting guests, in their ice buckets – thanks to their fleet removal by the waiters). (II, “Paris in the Spring,” 136)

I am trying to learn something about the 1920s, so this book was perfect, maybe even essential.  “At the height of the Negro Renaissance I was a student at Lincoln University, spending my week-ends and holidays in New York” (III, “Lincoln University,” 212), meaning that Hughes has some healthy distance from whatever is going on in Harlem, yet he gets a good dose of everything – the personalities, the music, the parties, the eventual collapse along with the stock market and the economy.

But that is always his position, the writer’s position.  He is not quite in the middle of things.  Maybe just one step away.  He is always aware of what is going on around him, or so he makes it appear in retrospect, but I will bet it was true.

Hughes’s work as a sailor, up and down the western coast of Africa and in the Atlantic, was never as bad as what was portrayed in B. Traven’s crazy novel The Death Ship (1926), but it was definitely in the same general world.  That Traven novel, now there is another interesting book about the 1920s.  Do not lose your passport!  Hughes has enough trouble when his is stolen in Italy – “I got as hungry in Genoa as I’ve ever been in my life (except in Madrid, years later, during the Civil War)” (II, “Beachcomber,” 155).  But at least he does not end up on a death ship.

I will have to read the sequel, I Wonder as I Wander (1956), to see what Hughes does in Spain.

Page numbers are from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 13.

This last thought completely stunned me. - the last volume of the Education of Maxim Gorky

My Universities (1923) is the third volume of The Education of Maxim Gorky, my title for the trilogy, not Gorky's, but it fits.  Young Gorky, age 15, orphaned, with no resources he does not carry with him, moves to Kazan with the hope – utterly futile – that he can attend college.  Kazan is a change, though, identifiable as a “college town.”  It is full of student radicals, Tolstoyans, oddballs, and most importantly for Gorky, the future Gorky, ideas and books.  There is a thick, yeasty ferment of ideas, good, bad, and crazy.

Sometimes it is as if Gorky had moved to, I don’t know, Haight-Ashbury in 1966. It is not the Summer of Love yet, but there is a strong hippie haze.  I mean like this:

The fat lecturer, who was blind drunk, was sitting on the floor in his underwear with a guitar in his hands amidst a chaos of furniture, beer bottles, and discarded clothes.  There he sat, rocking himself and growling: ‘Mer-cy…’ (88, ellipses in original)

Gorky worked in a radical bakery.  With one eye on the police, he was able to include objects besides bread in his deliveries – messages, pamphlets, books.  He becomes friends with the grocer who “possessed the best collection of banned and rare books in the town,” a library for the student radicals kept “in a secret storeroom”:

Some of the books had been copied in ink into thick notebooks, for example Lavrov’s Historical Letters, Chernyshevsky’s What is to be done?, a few articles by Pisarev, Tsar Hunger, and Crafty Tricks.  All of these manuscripts were well thumbed and had been read again and again.  (36)

The secret police spent a fair amount of their time searching for illicit printing presses; this is the result, a living system of circulating manuscripts.

There is a joke about the kind of well-meaning reformer who loves humanity but hates people, with Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House as the great fictional example.  Gorky is the opposite.  He has the lowest opinion of humanity, of any hint of a mob.  He loves people, though, and the book is about the people who were his great teachers, even when they were wrong, or nuts, or both.

‘People seek oblivion, comfort, but not knowledge!’

This last thought completely stunned me.  (53)

I wish I had read Gorky’s autobiography a long time ago.  It’s view of Russia, or part of it, from the bottom, from a writer of such intelligence and energy, is unique.

Page numbers are from the Penguin edition, the Roland Wilks translation.

David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, a philosophical war fantasy stained with ulfire

David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) is some kind of “good bad book,” I suppose, in the ambitious rather than escapist category.  It is an exploration of modern philosophical ideas by means of a fantastic journey on another planet.  Characters have names like Maskull and Nightspore and grow and lose third arms and eighth eyes as they move around.  They debate the meaning of all things, often with paradoxes:

“You think you are thoroughly disillusioned, don’t you?  Well, that may prove to be the last and strongest illusion of all.”  (Ch. 20, “Barey”)

That line is said to Maskull, near the end of the novel, by Krag, who is the devil, or god, or, given the gnosticism of the novel, both.

If this sort of thing sounds too awful to read, then it will be.  I like it pretty well.  I understand the philosophy a lot better than when I read it twenty-five years ago.  I had thought of the ethos of the novel as generally gnostic, which it is, but now I saw more specific investigations of specific philosophical ideas.

There is the Nietzschean side.  Maskull, as he moves from one nearly uninhabited landscape to another, has trouble not murdering almost everyone he meets.  “’So you’ve been trying to find Surtur [god, maybe] on your own account, during the intervals between killing and fondling?’”  That’s Krag, again, on the same page, one of the few lines that suggests Lindsay has a sense of humor, or at least a sense of how ludicrous his story is.

Then there is Schopenhauer, lots of Schopenhauer.  The real story, roughly, is that Maskull is, like David Lindsay, a disillusioned war veteran who believes his, our, world is merely a representation of some more “real” world.  By means of Will, I guess, he penetrates the veil and travels to Arcturus, only to discover that there is likely an even more “real” world behind this one.  “’Side by side with it [this world] another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core’” (Ch. 14, “Polecrab”).  The novel describes his search for the real real world, which involves walking, climbing, and sailing due north, and murdering people.

Myself, I value the novel for its invention.  It is a fantasy of the purest quality, freed from almost all constraints of sense.  Arcturus has five primary colors, ours plus jale and ulfire, and this is not a throwaway gag, but used throughout the book (“It was an intense jale-blue. The whole northern atmosphere was stained with ulfire,” Ch. 20).  There is a mountain range that is in constant upheaval, with mountains rising and sinking with no warning.  There is a lake that can be played like a musical instrument, except the “music” is – this is the craziest thing in the book – an artillery attack:

When he came to his senses again, he saw everything.  Teargeld was gleaming brilliantly.  He was lying by the side of the old lake, but it was now a crater, to the bottom of which his eyes could not penetrate.  The hills encircling it were torn, as if by heavy gunfire.  A few thunderclouds were floating in the air at no great height, from which branched lightning descended to the earth incessantly, accompanied by alarming and singular crashes.  (Ch. 15, “Swaylone’s Island”)

I do not think that Lindsay is inventing here.  I will omit the description, a couple of paragraphs later, of a mangled corpse, a victim of the “music.”  For at least this one scene, A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel about the war.

falling to pieces, disintegrating - The Radetzky March

I have not been writing but I have been reading good books.  The best was The Radetzky March (1932).  The best novel.  There, I have set aside Yeats and The Tower.  The best novel.  Great novel.

Joseph Roth’s book would have fit in well several years ago when I spent a year or so reading a lot of Austrian literature.  His story of three generations of the Trotta family, military men or civil servants, and I mean “men” since the mothers sadly all die early, is in many ways a summation of earlier Austrian literature.  I thought the dialogue with Arthur Schnitzler was particularly explicit.  Roth will have his young officer work his way through most of the idiocy Schnitzler inflicts on his young officers – duels, gambling debts, destructive affairs.

The timing is central, though.  Roth begins his novel at the Battle of Solferino in 1859, but soon enough the pace and page count make it obvious that the novel will end with World War I.  All of the ideas of glory and honor, along with the duels and suicides, will be blown up, along with everything else, in the war.  It is an immense, blatant irony that the narrator openly mentions on occasion, noting that soon the officers in some scene will all be killed.

I know; Roth knows; every one of his readers knows.  “The country of the Trottas was falling to pieces, disintegrating” (Ch. 19, 288).  The Austrian Empire, a great culture in so many ways, could find nothing better to do with its young men than park them on the border in anticipation of war.  So of course war came.

The second great irony for Roth: in 1932, are we Austrians so sure that the break, before the war and after, is so clean?  Historical irony is the worst irony.

If I were to write more about The Radetzky March, I would write a post about Ch. 15, which is from the perspective of Emperor Franz Joseph I.  “Better far to seem simple than wise” (208).  The irony here is that he is present in the first scene – in the novel’s third paragraph – and alive for the entire fifty-seven years of the novel, dying two pages from the end.  “’I wish I’d been killed at Solferino,’ he said.  They did not hear” (317).  But what was he supposed to do?  What choice did he have?

Another post would have been about the big party scene at the end.  The announcement of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the spark of a war that will massacre the officers at the party, coincides with a massive thunderstorm.  It is a literal crashing irony.  Roth is a bold writer.

I think my favorite piece is Chapter  9, a description of a swampy borderland in Galicia, right in the middle of what I know will become a horrific bloodland, and not much fun for an army officer before that.

No one was as strong as the swamp.  No one could hold out against the borderland…  The isolation and swampy boredom of the garrison sometimes drove an officer to despair, to gambling, to debt, and into the company of sinister men.  The cemeteries of the frontier garrisons concealed many young corpses of weak men. (122-3)

Not that it would be much better, soon enough, to be strong.

The title page of the Overlook edition says “Translated by Eva Tucker based on an earlier translation by Geoffrey Dunlop.”  That original translation was from 1933.  This was a popular novel in some sense.  Well done, readers of 1933.

The most famous books I had not read but now have, 2018 edition, Cather and Wharton and Tintin

Ten years ago I assembled a little post about my 19th century Humiliations, the term, from a David Lodge novel I have not read, meaning the books it would be most shameful not to have read - if one were an English professor.  Which one is not.  It is just a game.  “Your bloody Hamlet” is the winner, I believe.  For non-professionals, it is in no way humiliating not to have read Hamlet.

Still, in a moment when I feel that I somehow know less than ever, it is nice to glance at that post.  I’ve read ‘em all, now.  Not bad.  Not so bad.

Based on a vague sense of prestige and imperfect memories of how often I see them mentioned in good literary writing, here are the Top Ten Humiliations I knocked off my list this year.  I had not, but now have, read:

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rainer Maria Rilke
The Custom of the Country (1913), Edith Wharton
My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sherwood Anderson
R.U.R. (1921), Karel Čapek
Red Cavalry (1926), Isaac Babel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), Thornton Wilder
La nausée (Nausea, 1938), Jean-Paul Sartre
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Country, 1939), Aimé Césaire
Illuminations (1966, but really most from the 1930s), Walter Benjamin

Some are more famous.  Those last two are more on the prestige end.  I am probably overrating the status of the Čapek play, but c’mon, the word “robot,” right?  I am probably overrating the status of the Sartre novel at this moment.  It was still a super-high status art object when I was in college.

The only one of those I would put on my Top Ten Best of the Year list would be Red Cavalry.  For the little that is worth.

My perspective about prestige and fame is United Statesian, with some sense that the rest of the world exists.  From the French perspective, though, I could add some books that are much-read in France but have made much less impression here:

“L’attaque du moulin” (“The Attack on the Mill,” 1880), Émile Zola
La Gloire de mon père (The Glory of My Father, 1957), Marcel Pagnol
Le Lion (The Lion, 1958), Joseph Kessel

These are all books the French read when young.  School stuff, sometimes.  The charming Pagnol memoir is read in the U.S. by real Francophiles.  Kessel was a journalist and travel writer who also wrote fiction.  This particular novel, about an English girl whose best friend is a lion, was on the shelves of every bookstore, along with a less predictable selection of other Kessel books.  It was translated long ago, but seems to have vanished in English.  It seemed good to me.  Not a thriller as we use the word now, but tense and frightening.

Really, from the French perspective, the most famous books I read this year, the most universal books, were:

Tintin, volume 4 (Cigars of the Pharaoh, 1934) through volume 9 (The Crab with the Golden Claws, 1941), Hergé
Blake and Mortimer, the first six volumes, meaning The Secret of the Swordfish (1950-3), The Mystery of the Great Pyramid (1954-5), and The Yellow “M” (1956), Edgar P. Jacobs
Asterix, volume 1 (Asterix the Gaul, 1961) through volume 3 (Asterix and the Goths, 1963), René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo

The first two are Belgian.  All three are on the curious Le Monde “100 Books of the Century” list, alongside Camus and Proust and The Little Prince.

The Asterix volumes were the hardest to find at the library – meaning, always checked out – which is why I read so few.  I became fascinated by the Blake and Mortimer books because they are, in many ways, quite terrible.  Nuclear war as envisaged by an eight-year-old obsessed with model airplanes, just to kick things off.  Barely a woman in sight, even in the backgrounds, in any of these books.

It would not be true to say that everyone in France has read the first volume of Asterix and, say, Tintin’s The Blue Lotus.  But it must be pretty close.  I am not exactly sure what I learned about French culture reading these comics, but I certainly felt I had joined in.

So this was my continuing Education, 2018.

The best French books of my year - Flaubert, Baudelaire, Sophocles, the usual stuff

My study of French has shifted my reading.  The point of reading in French is to learn French, so it hardly matters what I am reading as long as it is hard enough, yet the point – a point – of learning French is to read in French, so I sometimes indulge.  Meaning, gimme the good stuff.

I had wanted to get to the point where I could read Ubu Roi (1896).  And I did.  Similarly, Flaubert.  And thus Alfred Jarry’s muck-smeared puppet travesty and Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877) – especially, of course, “A Simple Heart” – are among the best things I read all year.

My reading in French is poor, full of errors in understanding that would bother me if I only knew what they were.  Ubu Roi is built out of all kinds of abuses of language, while “A Simple Heart” is an example of something close to perfection.  Was reading them in the original language better than reading a translation?  I don’t know.  Different.  But how well did I read them, really?

Sometimes my eyes were bigger than my stomach, so to speak.  Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Country, 1939), the poet’s angry poetic investigation of his experiences when he returned to Martinique from Paris, founding text of Négritude, would likely be one of the best books I read this year, but it was too hard for me.  I suspect it is not so easy in translation, either.  All right, next time.

Another special case was Oedipe roi by Sophocle, or as I would normally say, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, except that I read it in French, in the translation of Didier Lamaison.  I also read Oedipe roi by Didier Lamaison (1994), a transformation of the play into a detective novel, a polar.  It does not take much transforming.  King Oedipus is not what you would call a great detective, but he sure gets his man.

Any year I read a Sophocles play it will go on my Best of the Year list.  The detective novel was pretty good, too.

I should include Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans Paroles (Songs without Words, very funny, 1874), some but not all of the Molière plays I read – maybe Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman, 1670) – keeping in mind that I have not quite dared the really good ones.

Jacques Prévert’s Paroles (1946) was at times like the Césaire book, and otherwise the opposite.  Prévert wrote a spray of playful little lyric poems many of which are readable and enjoyable by people with elementary French.  I knew about those.  I was looking for those.  His famous first book has scores of them.  But they surround giant blocks of prosy, slangy satirical poems that made me work.  Well, this is how we learn.

I read several short Louis Aragon books, Feu de joie (Fire of Joy, 1920) from the early days of Surrealism and a couple of later volumes with some wartime poems, Le Crève-Cœur (The Heartbreak, 1941) and Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur (The New Heartbreak, 1948), the former so playful, the latter so sad.  Some of the war poems are available in English in the Poetry magazine archive.  Not much else, though.  Maybe I should try to write a bit about Aragon next year.

I have an idea that next year I might write something about a number of the books I have read in French.  I read all kinds of surprising things, most of which were not among the best books of the year.

Bruno Schulz's Collected Stories - transformations into ever more artistic configurations

This is not Bruno Schulz describing himself, but it is close:

It is a characteristic of my existence that I parasitize metaphors; I am so easily carried away by the first fine metaphor.  Having gone too far with this I must now withdraw with difficulty, returning slowly to reason.  (“Loneliness,” 232)

The difference is that Schulz is carried away by not just the first metaphor, but the second and third and on to the end of his inventive powers, which are substantial.  His two little books of stories, Cinnamon Shops (1934) and The Sanatorium under the Hourglass (1937), are treasure houses of metaphor.

The girl languidly sinks her hands into the dough of the bedclothes, still warm and yeasty from sleep.  Finally, with an inner shudder, with eyes filled with the night, she shakes out a large, ample feather bed through the window and fluffs of down float onto the city, tiny down stars, a lazy sowing of nighttime dreams.  (“The Pensioner,” 221)

Someone should count the references to stars in Schulz’s books, stars compared to things and things compared to stars.

There was no end to the transformations of the sky, the metamorphoses of its multiple vaults into ever more artistic configurations.  Like a silver astrolabe the sky opened its inner mechanism on this magical night and revealed in endless evolutions the golden mathematics of its wheels and cogs.  (“Cinnamon Shops,” 53)

One word in that quotation reminds me that Schulz is commonly compared to Kafka, and boy are there some weird correspondences: many father-son stories, transformations into a cockroach or a fly or a bird (although it is the father that is always transforming or dying or returning to life, not the son), and an unstable and uncannily shifting geography.  But Schulz’s flow of imagery, the images turning into images, is unthinkable in Kafka.  In Schulz, everything metamorphosizes, and is constantly metamorphosizing.  It is exhausting.

In Cinnamon Shops, the abundance of imagery exists within or atop a small Polish town and an ordinary family.  Or maybe the imagery creates the town and the family, the father and the common-sensical maid Adela and their strange adventures collecting rare birds or fighting an invasion of cockroaches.  The perspective is always that of the son, and there is the possibility that the magic of the town and the strange fates of his father are all in his imagination.  I find this book to be a beautiful rush.

Some of the stories in Sanatorium are more of the same – the continuing adventures of the father are unmissable – but in others Schulz pushes towards a purely poetic form of prose, where I wonder if there is anything left but metaphor.  The pieces function more as prose poems, but at such length that I find them quite difficult to follow, the novella-length “Spring” being the most extreme example.  Sections of that piece feel like they are made of nothing but Schulz’s beloved stars.

The page numbers above are from the new (2018) Collected Stories of Schulz, translated by Madeline G. Levine.  She is working from a corrected text, a plus, puts everything under one cover, and the old translations by Celina Wieniewska are known to have problems, beginning with a change in Schulz’s title, but when I did some spot-checking, comparing the new Cinnamon Shops with the old The Street of Crocodiles, I did not find anything that did not look like the usual differences between translators.  Levine uses more repetition and lets the sentences get a little more long and tangled, so the new translation is less “smooth” than the old one, but if you have an old copy of Crocodiles I would not recommend throwing it in the fireplace.  I guess I do not know how cold you are.  And maybe the differences between the two versions of Sanatorium are larger?

Cinnamon Shops was among the very best books I read this year. Parts of Sanatorium, too.  Not just this year; also, ever.

Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson - I collect ferns.

The title character of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911) is a femme fatale who descends upon Oxford, the university, I mean, and wreaks havoc among the students, in particular the young Duke of Dorset, although not all that much “in particular.”  Beerbohm spends most of his time with the Duke, is what I mean.

The novel may have some particular meaning to people familiar with, or even graduates of, Oxford, but to me it is a land as fantastic as Hobbiton.  It may also have some specific satirical meaning which is now desiccated, as weightless as the prose of Beerbohm’s fantasy, a quite pure fantasy the way I read it.

A moment later, a certain old don emerged from Blackwell’s, where he had been buying books. Looking across the road, he saw, to his amazement, great beads of perspiration glistening on the brows of those Emperors. He trembled, and hurried away.  (Ch. 1)

The sweat on the brow of the stone busts of the Emperors, well-known to Oxonians, I presume, is literal.  They are trying to warn Oxford of “the evil that was to befall the city of their penance.”

Zuleika and the Duke are gods who walk the earth.  Their meeting invokes some peculiar god-rules and god-magic.  Woe for the mere mortals who gaze upon them.

For the men, at least.  Up in the header of Wuthering Expectations I have plopped a quotation from Zuleika Dobson that is all-too-appropriate: “I’ve read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books.”  Now, at this point I have actually read, I don’t know, seventy-seven of the Hundred Best Books, but the character who says this, the daughter of the Duke’s landlady, is in her early twenties and I am almost thirty years older.  So, twenty-seven, not bad, right?

The landlady’s daughter is making her case to the Duke.  It is an injection of normality into the craziness of the novel.  Why should he pursue Dobson, the destructive – fatal! – celebrity when he could have someone devoted, sensible, and well-qualified to be the wife of a Duke:

“And I’ve gone on learning since then,” she continued eagerly. “I utilise all my spare moments.  I’ve read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books.  I collect ferns.  I play the piano, whenever...” She broke off, for she remembered that her music was always interrupted by the ringing of the Duke’s bell and a polite request that it should cease.   (Ch. 17)

How I identify.  How I enjoy Zuleika Dobson.  It is unique, or almost so.  I suppose to many readers it is an anchovy, inedible.

I am beginning to write about the best books I read in 2018.  Zuleika Dobson was one of them.